Unearthing contemporary art in Chicago and Elmhurst

Contemporary art is by definition the art of our times, but that doesn't mean that contemporary artists are only concerned with the present. Of course, artists have always studied the history of art in search of knowledge and creative inspiration, but a major group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art argues that for a significant number of today's most influential practitioners, it's history in a broader sense that fascinates. For these artists, making art can be a form of research and a method of digging into the past — hence the show's title: "The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology."

So what's in this new breed of artist-archaeologist's tool kit? According to this show, not many paintbrushes. There aren't really any shovels in there either, unless you're talking about the artist Mark Dion, who foregrounds a slew of them in the faux archaeological work station he constructed for the exhibition as a tongue-in-cheek homage to field work. Or Derek Brunen, whose six-hour color video shows the artist in a Vancouver cemetery, digging what will eventually be his own grave. Or Cyprian Gaillard, who salvaged four rusty "teeth" from the excavator buckets of enormous mechanical diggers and encased them in glass as if they were prehistoric relics. The exhibition's organizer, Manilow Senior Curator Dieter Roelstraete, has stationed the cases directly outside the show's entrance like totems.

Perhaps not surprisingly, cameras, photographs and film figure most prominently as the tools-of-trade and representational devices of choice for a good number of the artists here. Particularly favored are analog cameras — the kind that still use film — most likely because they're going the way of the dinosaur. (Other media on the endangered species list that get hearty representation in this show are books that still use paper and newspapers printed with ink. Archives, whether stored at physical locations or in virtual domains, are also subjects of great interest). Steve Rowell's "Points of Presence" charts a history of outmoded (or soon-to-be) 19th and 20th century transatlantic telecommunications technologies by way of the late, lamented slide projector. Stan Douglas's 7-minute-long, looped 16mm film combines three early cinema shorts shot from the roof of a moving train that was passing through the Rocky Mountains. Look for Joachim Koester's 16mm film projection inside the large wooden structure that looks like a shack — you can't miss it. The film itself, however, is all about searching and not finding. It's mostly white screen and grey splotches, hardly any readable images at all, and was derived from five rolls of film recovered from the bodies of Swedish explorers who died while on an 1897 expedition to the North Pole, which they attempted to reach by hot air balloon.

The exhibition's titular shovel also takes psychological forms. A number of works examine Sigmund Freud's legacy as the so-called father of psychoanalysis. Shellburne Thurber photographed the offices of several different psychotherapists, each one cluttered with tchotchkes and colorful tapestries and oddly similar to the others. This might be because the offices are also shrines to Freud himself, who apparently was an avid antiquities collector. Jason Lazarus' color photograph shows us the view its title promises, "Above Sigmund Freud's couch." What we see is bland, pink-patterned wallpaper and framed pictures of angels. What the people who once sat on that particular couch or countless other ones modeled after it saw while undergoing analysis, well, that's something a photograph can't unearth.

There's a tremendous amount of rich and varied content to mine from Roelstraete's deeply philosophical exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, which reveal above all else that there's really no such thing as History; there are only "histories." Indeed, there are so many different histories at play in this show, its overarching trajectory becomes hard to locate after awhile. Maybe that's the point. Still, I'm glad that I took advantage of the audio guide produced by the MCA's education department — it adds another layer to the viewing experience, as it were, by giving voice to a lively array of professionals — not just the show's curator and artists but psychoanalysts, historians and yes, archaeologists too, all of whom bring the unique perspectives of their fields to the art works they discuss.